The Addressee of Ovid’s letter Tristia 3.4:
The Addressee of Ovid’s letter Tristia 3.4:

Summary/Abstract: The premise of this article is that one method for establishing the identity of the anonymous addressees of the Tristia, Ovid’s first book of letters from exile, is to assume that the author alludes to their names by reference to a famous namesake. This premise is based on the fact that a letter addressed to an individual called Brutus (the overtly-declared recipient of three letters) contains a reference to the famous Marcus Brutus, one of the assassins of Julius Caesar (Ex Ponto 1.1.24). We also explore another method of accessing the identity of these correspondents, namely the possibility that their names are creatively etymologised over the course of the relevant poem. We make the assumption that the anonymous letter Tristia 3.4 is addressed to this same Brutus, on the tentative basis that the intense sympathy shown to Ovid by Brutus in Ex Ponto is reflected in the behaviour of the recipient of Tristia 3.4. It emerges that the poem contains a wealth of highly cryptic allusions to the various meanings borne by the word ‘brutus’ in Latin. To assist this line of enquiry, we appeal to the meanings of ‘ὦμος’, the Greek equivalent of ‘brutus’, along with the nuances borne by the adjective ‘brut’ in Romanian. However there is also a highly iconoclastic aspect to our approach. For reasons that will be explained, we assume the position that Ovid has inserted words intermetrically within his elegiac couplets. These words may be spelt and scanned in a manner to be expected of an auxiliary cavalryman, resident in Tomis, whose first language is Greek, and whose funerary inscription is being composed during the indeterminate period between retirement and death. This is the persona we attribute to the exiled Ovid, who declares that his Latin contains unmetrical solecisms and who also declares that his ideal reader is one who takes his words at face value (‘candide lector’: Tristia 4.10.132).

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